We're all out of Naomi Rye, I'm afraid. Challah!!

I'm not one for proclaiming something to be my favorite. Unless we're talking about Chocodiles.

In most every other case I struggle to come up with something and instead respond with something lame like, "I more like have favorites of every genre," and when pressed, I usually can't even do that. Favorite movie? I dunno. Give me a genre. Sci-fi? Aliens. No Blade Runner. No 5th Element. No Looper. Let's try a different one. Action? That's easy Die Hard. Or The Transporter. Or the Bourne Ultimatum. Musical? Don't even start with me. Romantic comedy? One Fine Day NEXT.

Anyway, that's why sometimes if you ask my favorite book, I say A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. But other times I say it's The Great Gatsby. And yeah guys, I know. That's easy. But people keep saying to write the Great American Novel and someone already did. Sorry about that.

For a while I thought it was because when we read it in high school I was the only one who laughed at the jokes and it made me feel ve-ry smug. And there's nothing a high school version of me liked more than being smug about things (I've changed so much!) But then I read it a couple years ago and guess what! Still pretty good. It's a good book. Here's what Hemingway said about him in A Moveable Feast:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

Anyway, I didn't read The Great Gatsby, like again again. Though I think I might. What I did read was Great by Sara Benincasa, who is a stand-up comedian and author of whom I have grown very fond. I read this article and it was really funny and inspiring (I just read it again and it gave me chills) and when she started talking about Great on Twitter I perked up. "I'll read more from her, regardless of topic." And then the topic was Great Gatsby but with teenaged girls. Basically she combined one of my favorite things with the most terrifying thing on earth.

I was committed, though, and I just finished it. Guess what? I liked it. Without getting too deep, I'll just say that the story follows the Great Gatsby pretty closely. Noami Rye visits her wealthy mom's world of super-rich sycophants and manages to have a pretty good time, actually. She gets sucked into a love triangle involving an obnoxious ex child actor, his beautiful girlfriend, and a mysterious new neighbor. She gets to flirt a little with the actor's aloof friend. They have fun banter. They're kinda nerds.

We talked about politics and history and lay around listening to NPR podcasts, our fingers entertwined. Once my mother walked in on us quizzing each other on SAT words in the living room in the middle of the night. 

There's sadness in these Hamptons, though. Especially in the face of one Jacinta Trimalchio

The girl stood up, facing the lake. The white light from the laptop screen lent her face an unearthly glow from below as she stretched out her arms toward the twinkling houselights in the distance. She held it for a long moment, like some yoga pose, just reaching and reaching for something I couldn't identify.

 So Naomi pals around with richest, most powerful people in New York, "full of fancy people who spend their days pretending, and their nights dreaming, that their pretense is real."

That's probably telling you enough, right? Here's the deal: if you liked that article I linked, you'll probably like Great. If you're a teenage girl or have been a teenage girl or knew some or wanted to know some in your teens you'll probably like it, too. Just have fun, you know? Life is fun.

Work was fun for me today. I counted deer poop, which sounds gross but wasn't cause I just pointed at a group of it and said, "one," and then "two," and so on thanks for listening.

Mommy Never Screams

Hey, before I get into this, do you think you could read the previous post? That'd be great. You're lovely, by the way. Like, as a person. I'm not saying from a physical standpoint, but listen, I'm not not saying that either. What I am saying, though, is that you're a good person for coming and reading my dopey blog.

A really good person. Go ahead. Pat yourself on the back. You know how you were thinking about maybe giving money to the homeless? Or making little survival kits and sending them to Haiti? You don't need to do that anymore. You've done enough. Just, you know, look in a mirror and smile at yourself and say "he's right, you know. You're something else, you."

Hey, did you know that you can get to this blog just by typing http://www.howiesbookclub.com in a web browser? It's that easy now. Bookmark it! Go tell your friends, why doncha?

Ok, back to your regularly scheduled (ha) blog.

<AHEM>

It started out completely harrowing. Then it was kind of exciting. Then it was really sad.

OK, yeah, that is my experience with playing little league sports as a kid. You got me. But that's not what I'm referring to at this point. Instead, what I'm talking about is The Bear, by Clair Cameron.

The story is told from the viewpoint of 5-year-old Anna. And the harrowing part is when her parents get eaten by a black bear.

I know. You're thinking that black bears just don't up and eat people without there being a lot of bad decisions on the part of the people. Yet in October of 1991 such a thing happened in Algonquin Park, a wilderness 200 miles north of Toronto. In that case there were no kids, but Cameron takes that story and adds two of them. They are Anna and Alex, though Alex is referred to as Sticky (because he's a two year old boy and that is the natural state of the two-year-old boy) and often just Stick. There is also Gwen, Anna's teddy bear.

Spoiler: Anna and Stick escape the bear, but then they live in the wilderness. That's the exciting part. The sad part is all of it, I guess. But especially the end.

You guys, I have a 5-year-old girl. And Clair Cameron just nails it. Forcing herself to tell the story from the random, meandering voice of a tiny child just works so well, and I thought it wouldn't. Man, I really thought it was going to just fail. And yet there I was just sitting next to this little girl and watching her and listening to her thoughts and you guys, I just wanted to hug the crap out of her.

The air is cold. I roll closer to Stick. His breath goes in my ear and it is warm. A little piece of light from the fire is having a dance on the side of the tent but only a little because it is not dark yet. There is no music except Stick's nose air and still the light flicks and rolls on the side of the tent.

She's so brave. And Stick is so cute and so annoying. And thank heavens for Gwen, you guys. Anna really needed Gwen.

Have I admitted to crying in every entry of this blog? I mean at this point it's not endearing or cute. It's just kinda, I don't know, gross?

Anyway, I cried at the end and I was on the train so yippee.

Daddy put his finger to his lips to tell me shh and picked me up with his muscles like I was a baby. Normally I'm not the baby anymore but I was snuggled on his shoulder and no one could see so it was nice to be the baby. Daddy put a blanket around us like Batman's cape, so I'd be warm. He walked out through the zip door. His chin and the whiskers were there and they would grow because he is on our holiday... He laughed a little rumble in his chest that I hear because my ear was smooshed against it and warm. He stood on the edge of the beach and I knew because I could hear the water lick at the stones and I could smell it being warm and deep too.

So watch Disney's Bears or whatever. I hear it's really cute.

A Modest Proposal that Does Not Involve Eating Babies

UPDATE: You can just read it here.

                                                                                            Source: Wikimedia Commons

Hey folks. Those who know me personally know that I do dumb stuff. Like all the time. So here's the newest dumb thing I'm thinking about doing:
What if I made a website and published my novel on it? Like a real website and not some blogger thing. It would be a 2-3 times a week update kind of thing and I'd rewrite my first draft and post it as I do.

DID YOU GUYS KNOW THAT I HAVE WRITTEN A NOVEL???!?!?!?!?!

"OK," you say. "What if? Who cares? What do I have to do with this? Is this some kind of thought experiment? Why are you looking at me like we're on a desert island and picturing me as a t-bone steak or a chicken leg?

Well here's what I say in reply: what if you paid a couple of bucks?

I've lost some of you already. For those still here, here's what I figure: it would cost about $60 to host a site on which I would post this thing. Are there 30 of you who would pay $2? 20 who would pay $3? These are the kinds of questions I think about when I'm trying to go to sleep.

What if, and bear with me on this one, what if I did a Kickstarter to raise $60?

This is what such a thing would look like: I would rewrite and post the first two chapters and post it on Kickstarter with an impassioned plea similar to this one. If you like what you read, you can pitch in. If you don't: listen, we're still friends. And here's the really interesting part: if you like what you've read so far, would you share it with people who are strangers to me? Like, your cool (wealthy) Facebook and Twitter and real-life friends? Is that a thing that would happen?

Would you on your own blog tell people, "Hey dudes I've got a friend trying to do this thing?"

There are some caveats here:
Please don't agree to this out of charity.
This is a genuine request to gauge interest. If you have no intention of reading what I write but hope that I'll shut up about it on Facebook, just ask me politely to shut up about it on Facebook.

If we want to do this as a fun Kickstarter with rewards the goal would be a little more than $60
That way if I mail you something or give you a lil' present the money or I come have lunch with you it doesn't come out of hosting fees and negate the whole thing

If by some miracle a bunch of people read and like the book, I may have ads on the site.
This is something I'll have to think about. But I want to be up front with everyone right away that this is a possibility.

Here's all you have to do right now. Leave a comment on this post saying "yeah, man, let's do this." OR comment on the Facebook post saying, "Listen. I'll give your two chapters a shot. No promises, but I like your smile so I've got a couple of seconds to waste on your B.S." You don't have to commit to anything, just let me know if you're interested. Also you could private message me or text me or call me or stop me in the street and make a similar statement by using one of those methods or even something more creative like skywriting or something. Though, let's be honest, if you're going to spend that much on skywriting I'd rather you just contribute that to the Kickstarter.

Pre-teen girls with guns sounds kinda bad when I think about it

You guys, have I talked about True Grit yet?

I read it ages ago. It might have been when I was between blogs. Or maybe I've already written about it and it was brilliant and I've forgotten but you remember and you'll compare this one unfavorably. Back then I still had some passion. It was before I'd "sold out." Now I'm just catering to the masses and have lost my sense of individuality. Also you liked my drummer better then, which honestly I'm not sure what you're even talking about at this point, hypothetical reader.

You see I make up hypothetical readers because I have very little evidence of any other kind.

Anyway, the reason I want to talk about True Grit is because of One Came Home

Do you guys like it when I say I'm going to write about one book and then I talk about the other one first and then circle back to the original one? Hmm. How about you, hypothetical reader? You're on board? Good.

I just finished Amy Timberlake's One Came Home, like two hours ago, and gosh I sure liked it. If you forced me by gunpoint to rank the books I've read in the last few years I'd probably make you shoot me because I hate ranking things instead of just enjoying them and frankly I'm glad that I live in a world where all of these great things exist. I liked this book that much.

I liked True Grit a lot, too. And the reason I bring it up is because they start out very similarly. So much so, in fact, that I almost stopped reading One Came Home. I'm glad I stuck with it, though, because the two diverge in a very satisfying way within a couple chapters, and then I found myself on a journey that was equally delightful but in very different ways.

True Grit

“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.” 

Maybe you've seen the movie and have a pretty good idea of what we're dealing with here, and you'd be right. The dialogue, which is witty and fierce and amazing is mostly intact. What you're missing out on, though, is the extra narration Mattie Ross provides. Like this:

“As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.” 

And this:

"I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well, that is superstitious "claptrap." My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33” 

Mattie Ross might be my favorite literary character of all time if I were the type to rank things.  (Which I'm not, but she's up there with Francie Nolan.) 

If you liked the movie, read the book. If you don't like any movies, read the book. If you don't like any books and have never enjoyed a book or if you only read books about vampires or about Mormons who fall in love you should still read the book.

Oh and while you're reading books read One Came Home, why doncha?

Listen: I'm not breaking any ground comparing this to True Grit. Some goofball on Goodreads called it "True Grit for babies." I think that's stupid, myself, but I've read both of them and have blogged about neither (I think), and anyway here's another thing: Whatever.

Even on Amy Timberlake's website there is the unfortunate quote from Bookpage, "...TRUE GRIT for the middle-school set" well guess what? Good books are for everybody.

“I say let all the earth be alive and overwhelmingly so. Let the sky be pressed to bursting with wings, beaks, pumping hearts, and driving muscles. Let it be noisy. Let it make a mess. Then let me find my allotted space. Let me feel how I bump up against every other living thing on this earth. Let me learn to spin.” 

They start out similar, and at first glance, but Georgie Burkhardt is not Mattie Ross. Just compare Georgie's above statement with Mattie Ross' musings. Georgie lets herself feel things harder. She's pragmatic, sure, but she's also a 13-year-old girl. I've heard criticisms that Mattie Ross is just interesting because she's a man in a 14-year-old girl's body. I don't necessarily agree, but I think it makes Georgie interesting that she's much more in touch with her emotions and still goes ahead and does something amazing. Also she's a crack shot. Best shot in town.

Instead of heading out to avenge her father's death, Georgie's looking into the apparent murder of her sister. She's not buying it, and sets out to figure out what went wrong. It has such a wonderful intro:

"So it comes to this, I remember thinking on Wednesday, June 7, `1871. The date sticks in my mind because it was the day of my sister’s first funeral and I knew it wasn’t her last–which is why I left."

Her companion, Billy McCabe is much more companionable than "Rooster" Cogburn. And yet they manage to share pretty delightful exchanges anyway. Each taking pleasure in outsmarting the other.

Anyway guys it's a good book. Also there's some great stuff about a massive nesting of the now-extinct passenger pigeon in 1871 that serves as a backdrop to Georgie's adventure. Don't let that middle-school crap fool you. We were all 13 year old girls once, right?

“Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.”

The nice thing about reading a gigantic book is that if you have promised to write reviews in a blog of every book you read, then you kind of have an excuse not to blog for a while. Then you finish said giant book and you find yourself in a situation where now you have to write about a book that's so big that you kind of don't remember how it started. This is a universal complaint, I know. I think it's pretty much existed forever.

The book, by the way, is Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. And listen, it's a heck of a book. It's a novel, first of all. And it's about World War II. Specifically, it's mostly about a recon platoon on the fictional island of Anopopei. There's another plot about a strained relationship between a General and a Lieutenant, and without giving too much away I'll say that the plots combine. Also, it's about how filthy guys can be when they're left out in the jungle for long enough, and I mean this in both their speech and their general cleanliness.

Mailer started it when he was 23, and wrote it in 15 months, so I already hate him. That the book is 718 pages and considered still to be one of the best books on war in American history, and then I'm like. On the back of the copy I have, the Providence Journal called it "The most important American novel since Moby-Dick." I know it doesn't do any good to compare yourself to others, but at 23 I'm pretty sure I was finishing Final Fantasy X. And even that I gave up because the final boss was too hard.

Mailer's obviously extraordinarily mature for his age at the time of writing, and his writing is, for the most part, phenomenal. Each character, throughout the book, gets his own sidebar where we find out what happened before the war to make them how they are today. A lot of the folks in the story are a little, uh, unlikeable, so this glimpse helps humanize them a bit. That being said, each of their stories ends up being just about the same.

Apparently 23-year-old Mailer had already decided that there wasn't a marriage that he could make it past the honeymoon, for example. He draws the experiences of the characters in the book from his own experience in the Philippines during the war, so I assume there's some truth to the stories each soldier experiences, but I also think he might have come back just a little jaded after hearing the older soldiers constantly harping on their old ladies.

I think when I imagined the war when I was younger, it was very much influenced by Saving Private Ryan, which is to say harrowing and violent and noisy. But since we knew so clearly who the bad guy was, it was also heroic. One of those things where even though the job is tough, and you're not sure you can do it, you know that you have to do it, because it's the right thing to do.

What The Naked and the Dead captured, though, was the boredom and uncertainty and just ugly slogging through mud that I'm also sure there was in that war, and in all other wars we've fought. A lot of the time the troops on the ground aren't exactly sure every single day that what they're doing is worth it. As I get older, I realize that even when the war is perhaps just, it's probably being run poorly sometimes, and soldiers who die often don't die for any good reason other than someone higher up trying to impress their own superiors, or they read a map wrong.

In summary, I learned a lot from it, both about writing and about war. My grandpa was a marine in the Pacific. While reading this book, I spent a bit of time with him at a family party, and tried to imagine the now 80-something year old man as a soldier in the jungle during his late teens and early twenties. Then, while helping my mom compile old 8mm family movies of him as a young dad, I saw a lot of my own dad in him, and even myself. I wondered what quiet family life feels like to someone who spent years in the jungle, and I hope to ask him very soon.

The phrase "it is what it is" is stupid and doesn't make sense

Originally posted 6/3/12

What it is is this. I haven't written for a while about anything. What that means is that I'm in a situation where I try to remember things I've read or watched and already the purpose of this blog this year is kind of lacking, because I wanted to be able to look back on this and see all the books, movies, and sweet sweet games I played. What will end up happening this time, maybe, is a quick catch-up.

Bear with me, though. I've been wearing a pedometer for work to see how much I walk, and it turns out that when I'm hiking all day looking for hawk (understand that I'm using the word "hawk" as a catch-all for all birds of prey, but if I say "raptors," at least one person invariably thinks I'm looking for dinosaur bones) nests, the steps add up. Looking at the thing right now, it looks like I logged 19,000 steps or so today, or 11 miles. This is day five of such stepping, and not even the most I've walked in a day. Long story short, I'm not sure if I'm awake enough to make even a decent point. Let alone be funny.

Why even write, you ask? When from the get-go I'm making excuses for the quality of a post that isn't even written yet? And why do I keep inferring that this blog is supposed to be funny? How come I'm asking all of these questions and not answering any of them? Didn't my Writing For Magazines professor get after me once for doing that?

Anyway, I read The Family Fang. In it there's a family, named Fang, and they are performance artists. To be more precise, the parents are performance artists and they've kind of roped their kids into doing it because at least early on most kids don't have a lot of choice when it comes to these kinds of things. The Fang brand of performance art, though, is like a pretentious version of Punk'd. They stage elaborate pranks in public places and film them. Later, their now grown children are, um, a little messed up. But also very talented. Then there's a bit of an adventure.

It's a funny book, but it also gets into a discussion about what art is that I think is quite interesting. It's something I find myself constantly mulling over as I try to elevate my entertainment choices. Is anything anyone creates a kind of art? Even if it's something with a big budget and intense studio scrutiny? Or is art only found on the fringes, where people are pushing things in new directions that might be distasteful, and in some cases dangerous?

On Guns and Eleanor Roosevelt

Somehow, given the household I grew up in, I never really became a gun guy. To put a finer point on it, when my dad gets a new car, the NRA sticker goes on it before the registration one; yet aside from shooting a .22 in hunter safety at maybe 12, I managed to go until my late twenties without firing one of them. Now I sometimes go shooting with him -- pistols and shotguns, mostly -- and as things that make a loud noise and put holes in targets, I think they're kinda cool. I like the kick the flash and the immediate disintegration of clay targets. I've got to say that yeah, on some sort of evolutionary boy level, I kinda get it now.

That's not the motivation, though, for the book I've been reading for the past few months that has essentially held you all back from hearing about new books from me. It's The Gun, and it's by C.J. Chivers.

Not since World War Z have I read a book that is so good, yet so hard to talk about without making me seem like sort of a nut job. Quick aside: while interviewing for a job once, I was asked what book I had most recently finished reading. Instead of saying The Road, which was the second-most recent read and would have probably been met with nods of approval, I dropped the zombie bomb. I think I backed it up pretty well, saying that it wasn't really about zombies, rather the way the world's societies would react to some kind of world-wide apocalypse, but I imagine there were weird looks. It was a phone interview, with like 10 people on the line at once. Also, I didn't get the job.

Anyway, I find myself in the same situation when people ask what I'm reading now. "It's about the history of the AK-47," I say. And then they politely talk about literally anything else in the world. "No," I say, "It's not, like, about the gun. I mean, it's in the title, but it's about the history of modern war. And industrialization. And the parts of the Soviet system that worked. And let's be honest. When that thing was doing what it was best at? It was the best at it." Like all good history books, The Gun tells a story with a consistent narrative instead of just listing facts. The only difference between it and other epic, multi-generational stories, is that its main character is possibly the most deadly weapon in history.

It's a rough read, though. I had to take quite a break after the World War I bit, for example, because guys, World War I was horrible. There is a reason that all you see in movies is filthy people slowly dying of disease as they ran around in trenches, occasionally being shot right through the helmet anytime they were talking to the main character. It's because that's what it was. Well, aside from the charges. In the Battle of the Somme, more than 1 million troops died, with the British suffering almost 60,000 casualties on the first day. Turns out you don't march with bayonets against machine guns. Those are the kinds of lessons you get from The Gun. I haven't even gotten to the terrorist and child soldier parts yet.

So yeah, I take breaks. During the most recent one, I read Dead End in Norvelt, by Jack Gantos. It's fun, this book.

Norvelt, it turns out, is a real place. And hey, you know how people like to point out that the location of a story is as much a character as any of the living characters are? And how they act like they're the first to say that? Well Norvelt, Pennsylvania is as much a character in this story as any of the living characters are. Eleanor Roosevelt (Nor-Velt, get it?) decided that laid off miners needed a place to live that wasn't super crappy. Her husband and his advisors had laid out a plan for a bunch of shacks that folks could build themselves and live in, pitching in together to build different parts and then paying them off by working their own land and a community plot. She pushed for New England-style houses instead, and at least for a while, it worked pretty fine.

By the time Jack comes to age, though, it's a little shabby. That first generation of miners have all died of the black lung by the 60s, and it's hard to tell if the town itself or those miner's widows are dying faster. Jack, grounded for the whole freaking summer, only has one reprieve from digging his commie-fearing dad's planned bomb shelter, and that's writing obituaries as dictated by an old lady. As you can tell this is a very funny book. I actually mean that. It made me laugh quite a bit, and the writing is sharp and fun and it made me forget, however briefly, about guns that harness the recoil and gas expansion of an exploding bullet and use it to feed the next round into the chamber in fractions of a second. So thank's for that, Dead End in Norvelt.

I'm looking at my stack of books, and I realized that Mailer's World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead is next. I'll be honest, that one might get put aside for a bit.     

Check back tomorrow, by the way, cause I think I've got another one of these things brewin'.

Owls are so hot right now

So I haven't read any of the Game of Thrones books. And I've barely seen any of the show. That being said, I hear there's some crazy bonkers stuff in those books with the incest and the doin' it and the murder. So the guy who's sitting across from me reading one of the books with a huge grin on his face is making this an uncomfortable morning from the get. I hope there's some good jokes in there and he's not smiling at the baby-stabbings, is all I'm saying.

Alright, alright. Good morning. Yesterday I finished Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris so I might as well talk about it, huh?

This might be a two book blog now that I think about it, though, because at this point you probably know what's going on here. I almost hesitate to be at all critical because I feel like Sedaris is such a big sweetie that if somehow my words reached him he'd be sad. Does anyone want to make David Sedaris sad? I submit to you that they do not.

So I guess I'll just get it out of the way. I love about 3/4 of this book. I understand the bind that it puts him in, because he's told so many stories by now it's probably hard to dig more up from his past, and his new stories are a little harder to relate to (we bought yet another house in another amazing place, but get this there's litter in England) but darnit I just think his fiction/satire is not entertaining. I assume this is the "etc." advertised on the cover.

There are the usual heartwarming stories of Sedaris' family, which alternates between dysfunctional and loving (like most families, I guess) and a couple of them really got me right here. There are stories of Sedaris and Hugh's adventures as they buy and sell real estate across the world, which are funny and interesting in a stranger in a new place sort of way, and then there are the stories where Sedaris puts himself in the shoes of someone he disagrees with. These are just too broad for me. They seem to be based on the weirdos who call in to talk radio, and sure those folks exist, but they're even boring caricatures of themselves. I guess I'm disappointed because Sedaris is so loving and kind to the people he loves, in spite of many, many flaws, that I think his writing would be more effective if he applied this kind of empathy to the "other" that he's trying to skewer.

Anyway, still fun to read, guys. I totally recommend it.

Inner-city Dendrology, or How a Title Can Destroy a Blog

I've started this entry a few times and it keeps refusing to go anywhere. A big problem is trying to find book quotes from it. Cause the book I'm going to talk about in a bit has great quotes, but all the ones on the internet are not my favorite. This is because I'm essentially better than the internet.

"Better than the internet!" Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's going to be the catchphrase for this blog from this point on.

Oh wait I found the quotes I wanted. Sorry, Internet. Friends?

Anyway, the other reason is because I didn't have an intro, but man oh man did I just kill it just then. Killed. It.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

For most of my life the only thing I knew about this book was that it existed and was probably a classic because it was in a Looney Tunes episode "A Hare Grows in Manhattan." I tried to embed the video but every version of it is broken. I think there's another gag where books are all literal and like a tree grows out of the book or something? I watched a lot of Looney Tunes as a young kid but I was also doing a lot of drugs back then so I might not remember everything and it's possible that I made some of it up.

So there you go, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. There's a tree in it. Good morning everyone, enjoy your day. I hope my humble lil' blog cheered you up a little.

“If there was only one tree like that in the world, you would think it was beautiful. But because there are so many, you just can't see how beautiful it really is.” 

OK, I did actually read it. There is a tree in it, but guys, the tree is a metaphor. Get this. Francie Nolan, who I have now learned is one of the most beloved characters in American Literature, is a little girl growing up in severe poverty in Brooklyn. Her parents are described like this:

“Katie had a fierce desire for survival which made her a fighter. Johnny had a hankering after immortality which made him a useless dreamer. And that was the great difference between these two who loved each other so well.” 

Francie's mom is a pragmatist

“I hate all those flirty-birty games that women make up. Life's too short. If you ever find a man you love, don't waste time hanging your head and simpering. Go right up to him and say, 'I love you. How about getting married?” 

And then there's Francie:

“And the child, Francie Nolan, was of all the Rommelys and all the Nolans. She had the violent weaknesses and passion for beauty of the shanty Nolans. She was a mosaic of her grandmother Rommely's mysticism, her tale-telling, her great belief in everything and her compassion for the weak ones. She had a lot of her grandfather Rommely's cruel will. She had some of her Aunt Evy's talent for mimicking, some of Ruthie Nolan's possessiveness. She had Aunt Sissy's love for life and her love for children. She had Johnny's sentimentality without his good looks. She had all of Katie's soft ways and only half of the invisible steel of Katie. She was made up of all these good and these bad things. 

She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, desparing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk. 

She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only- the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life- the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.”  

You guys I love Francie. I love her mom, and her brother, and her dad, even though her dad is a drunk and her poor mother has to work her beautiful hands to callouses to make up for his drunkenness. You guys her dad does something so sweet for Francie that I can barely write about it. It's one of the loveliest things that has happened in a book that I've ever read. Please read it and tell me what you think.



Post-script:

So I Googled "Brooklyn kittens" and what I came up with was a gem. According to this article, two kittens were on the Brooklyn subway and it was shut down to rescue them. This turned into a fight between two mayoral candidates over whether liking kitties was a good thing which included one candidate posing with a tiger cub and then, surprisingly, a debate about Muslims where "Moses never killed anyone." Listen, I've seen The Prince of Egypt. Don't mess with Moses, is what I'm saying.

Notes on an expanding universe

I love that I keep introducing blog posts with my big goals for keeping up to date on posts. I'm like, "Hey guys you'll get two of these a week." And you're like good one.

And it probably is a good one. Probably as good a one as any of the ones I've put in here during the last couple of weeks. The fun part is that when I put a joke out it's like making a lovely pie and sending it out in to space. Nobody's going to eat the pie, because nobody is out there paying attention in space. My best hope is that said pie bounces off a satellite or something and the satellite looks over it's satellite shoulder and says, "did something just hit me?" And then the satellite shrugs.

Also the pie was made of gravel.

Listen. I know you just read that and thought now that's something I could never do. Make a simile about pies and satellites. This is why I'm me and you're you and you're probably very happy with yourself and I have to constantly seek approval by writing blogs that no one reads.

Is it kitten time yet?

So let me look at this here Goodreads app to see what else I've read and not considered. Oh yeah!

Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures, by Kate DiCamillo

I blame comic books for not writing, so I can blame Super Mario Land 3D for not blogging. And not reading new books. And not making any friends on the train. Oh, I guess I can blame a dry persistent cough and my tendency to look like someone you don't want to start a conversation with for the latter part. Hey, I'm on a train and I'm interested in talking to a stranger. There's a cute college girl or that guy in the hoody buried in a Nintendo machine with the twitchy eye. I wonder how many Pokemon he's found!

So instead of reading my own books for fun I read books to my girls before they go to bed. And the most recent one we read was Newberry Award winner Flora and Ulysses.

A lot of folks assume it's easy to write a children's book. And obviously it is easy if you want to churn out garbage. 

<Ahem> Hey, I'm a big-time celebrity and I don't have talents but people recognize my name. I'll write a book about an oyster who gets bullied or whatever. 

That's my impression of some people who are writing children's books.

But the people who are really doing it are doing the hardest job there is, I think. Here's a brief digression that will eventually lead back to the book at hand. The book I read to the girls right before this one was Ramona the Brave by Beverly Cleary. And here's another digression: when I was growing up my mom would read scary books every once in a while. Not often, because she said she needed to get the scary out of her system from the last book before she could read another one. Well that's how I am with Ramona Quimby books, instead of being scared I start crying at some point in every one of those books. The reason why is because when I read a Ramona Quimby book I can see how my girls are seeing the world and it breaks my heart a little that even when Ramona's parents and teachers are doing their very best she's still pretty confused and sad and disappointed in life sometimes. And scared. And it hits me that my kids feel like that too and it's just part of growing up and why do they need to go and do a thing like that?

Anyway, Flora and Ulysses is another book that does that. Flora is dealing with rougher stuff than Ramona ever did and I think it makes sense for a modern book for her to have to deal with divorced parents who don't understand her sometimes. Her mom especially is wrapped up in her writing career and worries that Flora is too weird and wants to discourage that so that she can be a normal, happy girl. The discovery of a super-powered squirrel who she is determined to mold into a superhero who can fight crime doesn't help this situation. There's a whole other cast of weirdos and Flora is told at one point that "the universe is expanding." During her adventure she discovers insights about said universe that expands the way she sees it, too.

"Nothing
would be
easier without
you,
because you
are 
everything,
all of it-
sprinkles, quarks, giant
donuts, eggs sunny-side up-
you
are the ever-expanding
universe
to me.” 

One thought I had while reading this is that happily there has never been a better time to be a little weird as a kid. When I was young I felt like it was important to hide my enthusiasm for your Metroids and Zeldas and Marios and your what-have-yous from my peers. For every secret I revealed about warp zones I had to make sure to know enough about the Dallas Cowboys and 49ers to please my peers. Of course I failed, but I still tried.

Now my son can wear a Minecraft hat to school and the other kids say, "Minecraft, cool." My daughter can be obsessed with dragons and Legos and make little shields and swords out of paper for her Mega Man figure and nobody gives a crap. 

I'm not saying the world is a better place except that I kind of am. There's this climate change thing that is making animals like pikas have to really struggle and that bums me out kind of a lot. But people are also generally getting cooler about each other's weirdness and that's fantastic. 

Anyway. Flora and Ulysses is very, very sweet. It's funny, too. And insightful. The illustrations are adorable. And the universe is expanding. Turns out in an expanding universe there's room for everybody, which is a nice thing to remember every once in a while.

Murder in the 50s was so much simpler, wasn't it?

Here's a "great" idea. I've decided that I'll write for an hour every day on the train. It's not that burly of a goal given I spend about 4 hours on the train Monday-Thursday. But here I am the second week in and already I'm really losing motivation for it. If this blog has a desultory feel to it, you're welcome to request your money back. I can't guarantee my staff will get right back to you, but every request will be considered.

Sometimes this time will be spent on fiction writing, which will probably never be read but is again good practice. But hopefully it also leads to more blogging. Last year I migrated my blog to this spot and decided to focus it on books - at least for books as a launching point for writing about whatever I like. The old general blog was set to private for a while, but you can find it again at A Desk Full of Misc.

Whew! I think we're all caught up now. That's nice, isn't it? For those of you wondering what's going on in my pretty little head on the train while I silently judge everyone for what they're reading, I think you're probably all caught up. (Here's a hint: if the back of your book is covered completely by a picture of the author I'm privately barfing).

So here's a book I read! A Kiss Before Dying. Ira Levin has written a couple books I'm sure you've heard of, like Rosemary's Baby, and The Stepford Wives. Up to now I'd never read anything by him, but A Kiss Before Dying is his first. Levin wrote it in the 50s when he was 25, which I mean come on. Levin's smart, though, in the sense that he writes about young people instead of trying to guess what it's like being much older. I think this is probably the key to writing well when you're young and probably understand better what it's like than you ever will again.

A Kiss Before Dying follows a sociopath college student obsessed with marrying an heiress. He's handsome and manipulative and has no compunctions about how to get what he wants. Things don't go quite as planned, let's say. The more I talk about it the less fun you'll have figuring it out, so I'll leave it at that. There is at least one really great reveal, so don't look too close into it before reading.

There's lots of clever stuff here in terms of story structure. Much of the book is from the Villain Protagonist point of view, but in contrast to something like Breaking Bad or Mad Men, there is never any point where you root for the villain, even if you understand his intentions. It's an interesting device, but luckily later in the book we get into some other character's heads.

By the end of August, when he had been in New York five months and had had six jobs, he was again prey to the awful insecurity of being one among many rather than one alone; unadmired and with no tangible sign of success.

The point of view switches in interesting ways and there are some sneaky little surprises throughout. I think it wraps up a little too tritely, but aside from that I don't have much in the way of quibbles. I like the amateur sleuthing that takes place among some of the characters, and it's nice the way they have people move in and out of each others' stories.

Here's something I could relate to:

Viewing himself again as he refastened his jacket, he wished he could as easily exchange his face, temporarily, for one less distinctive design. There were times, he realized, when being so handsome was a definite handicap.

Speaking of asking the wrong questions...

So I just realized that even though I'm writing these in chronological order, since I'm dumping them all at once you're probably reading them backwards. Anyway, speaking of Lemony Snicket, I read When Did You See Her Last? All I can say is I hope that this isn't a trilogy. It is, however, #2 of the All the Wrong Questions series.

So this is a book about kids, I guess. And it has cute illustrations, and the author's pen name is whimsical. But doggonit if it isn't a good piece of literature anyway. I liked the Series of Unfortunate Events series, and have been known to say that it's a good primer for learning to read seriously both for the young'uns and the beach page-turner only adult crowd. I mean that by reading those books you can learn how to read harder books and have fun doing it. It's like a college lit class but without all of the dichotomy talk and girls with crushes on the sad professor who wishes he were a writer. You know, like if he had a blog that received upwards of 25 views per post like me.

The series has its share of missteps, though, and by the end I was a little sick of Snicket's mannerisms, so it was with a little trepidation that I started into the All the Wrong Questions books. I was intrigued by the premise that they were an homage to the detective novels of the 30s and then I was like sure.

Now I've read a lot of books of that era (one is coming soon, so FUN!) and then I've read a lot of books trying to capture that same mood and feel to varying degrees of success. I've mentioned a couple who I think nail it. But dangit if Snicket doesn't blow them all out of the water.

"He looked like the kind of person who would tell you that he did not have an umbrella to lend you when he actually had several and simply wanted to see you get soaked."

"It was the color of someone buying you an ice cream cone for no reason at all."

And this one. Holy crap, people. I mean are you seriously reading this right now? Was I seriously reading it? Am I typing it? I can't remember what I was saying:

"The three of us stood there for a minute. I don't know what Stew was thinking, and the filing cabinet wasn't thinking anything. But I was thinking, is this the world? Is this really the place in which you ended up, Snicket? It was a question that struck me, as it might strike you, when something ridiculous was going on, or something sad. I wondered if this was really where I should be, or if there was another world someplace, less ridiculous and less sad. But I never knew the answer to that question. Perhaps I had been in another world before I was born, and did not remember it, or perhaps I would see another world when I died, which I was in no hurry to do. In the meantime, I was stuck in a police station, doing something so ridiculous it felt sad, and feeling so sad it was ridiculous. The world of the police station, the world of Stain'd-by-the-Sea and all the wrong questions I was asking, was the only world I could see."

People. I can do this all day. Literally. This is a long train ride.

OK, one more:

"The dumplings had the flavor of paradise, and the broth spread through my veins like a secret that's fun to keep."

I really like Daniel Handler. I like that he's bringing an adult novelist's chops to young adults. I like that he allows the medium to let him be funny, and satirize literary tropes, and teach vocabulary and he does it with the confidence of... like a woman selling pudding or something? I'm not as good at this is he is.

In which I divulge a secret

Hey guys, here's a thing I'm trying to fix about me. I'm sick of critiquing things negatively. I know, you're probably wondering what I even talk about anymore if I'm not telling you how much I don't like a movie I've never seen. I'm not sure what to do with myself either. Instead of tearing something apart, my new goal is to shrug and say, "eh, it wasn't for me."

That brings me to this situation. Of the books I've read recently there were a few that I really disliked. Part of the reason I didn't write for a while is how bad of a time I had reading these. Some I finished and some I didn't. Out of posterity, I'll list them and briefly explain why I wasn't into them but hey, you can read whatever you want and even love it. I'm not the boss of you. Yet.

MaddAddam

This is the third book in the MaddAddam trilogy and that should have been my first warning. I can't remember the last book I enjoyed that was billed as part of a trilogy. I literally can't. The best I can come up with is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, which is six books. Anyway, I quite liked the first one, Oryx and Crake, but back then nobody was calling it a trilogy. I really disliked the second one, Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam totally didn't let me down in continuing what I considered a downward spiral. 

Every character I liked from the previous series is reduced to a shell in this one and the new ones are interchangeable and boring. It goes off on a tangent that I couldn't care less about and ends with everyone essentially doomed, even though I don't think that's what the author intended. 

Savages

This is the first book on the Esquire greatest books for dudes or whatever that article was called that I linked in my first post that I really hated. And man, did I want to like it. It's about two guys who run a small pot operation who get in a war with Mexican cartels. Seriously, this is so up my alley. But I didn't like the characters, didn't like the "hip" writing style, and thought the story was unrealistic and dumb.

Thanks for nothing, Esquire.

Ugh, there are a couple others that I didn't even finish and don't even want to talk about. Sorry. Ask me about them sometime.

.

In which I tell you about a book and give you the proper warnings and let you figure out if you want to read it or not

Here's another book whose title will probably tell you whether you want to read the book or not. Ready? Here goes: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.

It's rare for a book's title to so fully explain what's within the covers. It's funny, it's flippant, it's kind of sacrilegious, and it deals with Christ's (here it's Joshua) life during the gap between the Frankincense and Myrrh stuff and the Matthew, Mark, John, and Luke stuff. I haven't seen Life of Brian but it's probably kind of similar. I'm not sure if Joshua himself drops the F bomb, but most everyone else does, is what I'm saying.

Look. I warned you. The thing about this book is that it's a work of fiction and certainly acts like it. The historic foundations of it are based on research, as in Jerusalem is based on real accounts of that time period, and in that sense I think it does a good job shedding light on what the real Jesus' childhood could have been like. But it's pretty much a fantasy novel. There's a giant demon in it, is what I'm saying.

I say that to justify myself when I say that I liked this book quite a bit. It's very funny, and I like the idea that Biff acted something like a Holmes to Joshua's Watson. This might take some explaining and luckily this train ride isn't going anywhere so I'll go ahead and explain it. See, the fun thing about Watson in the Sherlock Holmes books (and also captured quite well in the BBC reboot) is that Watson has no guile. He essentially can't lie, isn't sneaky, and is optimistic and friendly and lovely. Sherlock is the sociopath who barely understand human emotion and depends on Watson to help him see the humanity in people. Watson needs Sherlock to look at things realistically.

In Lamb, Joshua's sinless life causes problems as he and Biff make their way through a perilous journey in a world that is ready to take advantage of someone who cannot lie or deceive or steal. So Biff does all that stuff for him. Biff doesn't have much in the way of moral compunctions, and essentially does all the sinning for the both of them. He understands the darkness in people where Jesus only sees the good. It's a fun dynamic that works best when the two are dealing with devious characters looking to rip them off. It's at its worse when the author spends many pages having Biff engage in all of his sexual fantasies about groups of, say, Chinese concubines and working through the entirety of the Kama Sutra.

There's also kind of a lame running gag about Biff inventing all kinds of things that we take for granted. I'm not sure if this is just a way to introduce anachronisms for the convenience of getting them from point A to point B or what, but I'm sure I've read this kind of joke before. It's not my fault if I can't remember where. I woke up at a quarter to five this morning and hey, give me a break already.

So do I recommend it? I don't know. For me I could read this as a fictional story, and the Joshua in the story is as close to the one I believe in as a religious figure as the guy named Jesus hanging out in the Home Depot parking lot. Every adventure story is essentially a messiah tale, anyway. Long story short, if you anticipate that this kind of thing would bother you, it probably will. Luckily I have some more books to recommend in the very near future.

WARNING: This blog's title is not as long as the book being reviewed's title.

Here’s the dilemma. Do I address the fact that I haven’t written on this blog in however months it’s been? Or do I just act like it’s business as usual. Actually, at this point isn’t sporadic blogging business as usual? Just go ahead and nod.

So I’ve read a lot of books. Luckily for you I’ve been keeping track. And by keeping track I mean writing down the titles and rating them based on the standard 5-star scale. It’s possible that the only thing I remember about some of these is how many stars I gave it. We’ll see.

Hey, I’ll just start from first book I read after my last blog and go from there. Awesome!

Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures From the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other story We Couldn't Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out.

That is, indeed, the title of a lovely book of short stories. It’s especially nice to start out with since I get paid by the word and that title has a lot of words (disclaimer, I do NOT get paid by the word). Right off the bat you’re either charmed by that title or annoyed.

That’s a pretty good indicator about whether you’ll like this book or not. It’s weird and clever and pretty self-aware about how weird and clever it is. If I were forced to sum it up in one sentence (because maybe I’m paid by how few words I use? Is that a thing? The internet could be running out of storage space so it might be a thing.) (Disclaimer: as far as I know, the internet is not running out of storage space, also, I am not paid by how few words I use) I would say that it’s an introduction to literary short stories for young adults.

Let me drop a couple author’s names on you. Whether you’ve heard of them or not, nod wisely and everyone around you will assume that you’re very well read. Neil Gaiman? Jon Scieszka? One Lemony Snicket? Jonathan Safron Foer? A guy named George Saunders who I admit I am not familiar with but is considered one of the great modern short story writers? There you go, just nod. Good job. Now say, “Wow, this sounds like I book I would like to read!”

Here’s a secret: it is.

Another brief description I could come up with in this hypothetical world in which this blog makes money and said remuneration coming from brevity is this: have you ever seen the crazy adventure story advertisements in old magazines for boys? Imagine if those stories had been written by people who write good stories. Then imagine if all of these stories had been compiled into a book and that book was introduced by Daniel Handler AKA Lemony Snicket and the introduction made fun of all the hacky children’s books that you read in elementary school.

My favorite story was about a monster who terrorizes a summer camp and has a very thoughtful conversation with the scout troop’s outcast. Yours might be the story of the child growing up in the smallest kingdom on earth. What do I care?

And that’s my review of Noisy outlaws, unfriendly blobs, and some other things that aren’t as scary, maybe, depending on how you feel about lost lands, stray cellphones, creatures from the sky, parents who disappear in Peru, a man named Lars Farf, and one other story [...].